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'We only charge students once they get into the industry': Siddharth Maheshwari, Co-founder, Newton School

Siddharth Maheshwari, Co-founder, Newton School recently joined NewsX for a special conversation as part of NewsX India A-List. Newton School aspires to provide affordable education that is in line with industry standards, so that its students can be quickly absorbed into the system and contribute to an organisation’s success from the start. Speaking about the inception of […]

Siddharth Maheshwari, Co-founder, Newton School recently joined NewsX for a special conversation as part of NewsX India A-List. Newton School aspires to provide affordable education that is in line with industry standards, so that its students can be quickly absorbed into the system and contribute to an organisation’s success from the start.

Speaking about the inception of Newton School, Siddharth Maheshwari said, “We started Newton school around October 2019. Me and our co-founder Nishan, are friends from our IIT Roorkee days. We have been passionate about education since then. Nishan, in fact, is so passionate about education, that he left his, very lucrative, consulting job after his MBA from IIM Calcutta to join Unacademy as an intern. Just because it was in the education space. We did a startup together before Newton School, where we got a chance to talk to hundreds of students across India. During this time, we realised that while the students are really motivated, they lacked the skills, which are actually required by the industry. On the one side, there are millions of students who want to get into the industry and get into high paying jobs and, on the other side, there are hundreds and thousands of jobs that are like lying vacant in the industry side. There is a very big gap. The industry is not able to hire these students because they do not have the skills. That’s why we decided to fill this gap up.”

When asked about how Newton School is bridging the gap between industry and students, he responded, “We talk to hundreds of people in the industry, from software developers, CTOs to founders. We have designed a curriculum that suits the industry completely and is designed in such a way that a student, who joins an industry, is able to contribute from Day 1. That is how we have able to design a curriculum that is completely geared towards the industry.”

Talking about the competition in the education space, Siddharth said, “I think that education is such a big market in India and it is completely underserved so there is a supply constraint. There are not enough companies in this space. On the other side, we have a very strong USP, in the sense that we basically do not charge our students anything upfront. We are so sure about our curriculum and our education that we only charge students once they get into the industry at a job of at least five lakh per annum and that makes us really stand out in the industry. No one else in the industry is following a model like that. This has allowed us to keep our marketing costs to zero and has also allowed us to get you the best and most motivated students to study and become the best developers.”

He further emphasised that the students of Newton School are working with more than 175 companies, including top MNCs. “Our students are contributing to pretty much every sector. In fact, our students recently also got into the top media organisations in the tech role. Our students, you can say, today are contributing in every sector of the economy.”

Underlining the courses offered at Newton School, Siddharth said, “We have primarily three courses. One is a course, which is designed for those who are in the final years of their undergraduate. It can be any kind of undergraduate, could be a BTech, it could be a bachelors in art. We offer a minimum guarantee of five lakhs per annum, that is, you pick up a course which is completely online. It will range from four months to eight months, so this particular course that I’m talking about is six months long, where we teach students to be full-stack developers.”

Before signing off, Siddharth highlighted the company’s vision and future plans and said, “Most of the top leaders, especially in the tech sector, are from colleges like IITs. Our vision is to make sure that people from tier two, tier three colleges also get into the industry and, in some years, become the industry leaders, become the founders and become the CTOs”

“So, as an entrepreneur, it’s really important to understand your users better and know your users inside out, to be able to think like them, empathise with them a lot. If you understand your users really well then you understand their problems. You understand how to solve it for them and understand every small detail about it. What I say is, for every company, it is very important to be obsessed with your users,” he added.

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